We spoke with Alexandra Covaci, Senior Lecturer in Digital Design, to gain insight into her experience at the University of Kent. She shared some useful tips for prospective students, and the variety of fields that Digital Design alumni are now working in. As a degree dedicated to the intersection of technology, design and creativity, Digital Design enables students to gain vital experience for a career within the technology sector or creative industries.
What is your academic area of expertise?
To give you a very brief overview of what I did during my studies: I started with a Bachelor’s in Engineering for telecommunications. I then continued with a Master’s in virtual reality for industrial applications, followed by a PhD in Mechanical Engineering. I was mostly focused on developing virtual reality applications for training skills. And then during my postdocs and since I started here at Kent, I would define my focus and my expertise to be in the areas of immersive technologies: virtual reality, augmented reality, extended reality.
I’m interested in multi-sensory stimulation so actually stimulating more than the visual and audio when designing applications in interaction design. How to design things, especially in in 3D and human-computer interaction. I’m looking a lot into this relationship between humans and technology. I focus on designing interactive technologies that can enhance life by augmenting or extending everyday activities. My work explores technologies that can be designed to shape everyday life, with a particular focus on health, including areas such as eating, self-care, and well-being.
Usually, this involves building, evaluating, and informing new user experiences by designing and developing technologies, most often within immersive environments.
What is your biggest academic achievement – research or teaching wise?
I’m not sure I would call it my biggest achievement, but a project that I like talking about and that actually brings together research and teaching is one I worked on with a final-year Digital Design student I supervised. Together with the local musician Richard Navarro, the student developed a virtual reality experience to accompany an album, translating the songs into immersive environments that told the story of the main character. The project was later accepted as an interactive piece at a conference in Finland. For me, it was valuable not only as an example of how VR can be used in collaboration with artists to explore new creative mediums, but also because it combined my teaching and research interests, and opened the door to further collaborations with artists working in similar ways.
Are there any modules that you’d like to shout about?
I’m teaching on the Immersive Experiences, Interaction Design and Mixed Realities modules. For Mixed Realities, we collaborated with an Industry professional because this is a module for students taking their final year so having a good portfolio is very important for them to then go and show it to different employers.
We invited in a Digital Design alumni who now works as a User Experience Designer for the BBC. He tasked them to reimagine the interaction with BBC iPlayer in mixed reality, so we’re thinking about augmented reality, virtual reality and having different ways of interacting with this. This was the brief and we wanted students to come up with innovative ideas to prototype and use different types of software to prototype. They had to choose news, sports or music, so they had to focus on an area to get that experience of a client brief and receiving that kind of feedback.
What do you love about the University of Kent?
The campus and interesting initiatives like the Kent Community Oasis Garden.
I have nice colleagues across the University. My colleagues from Digital Design, and also the School of Computing, with whom I’m co-supervising PhD students. I have a collaboration with the Institute of Cybersecurity for Society and with the Institute of Creative and Cultural Industries. With the Institute of Cybersecurity for Society, I’m doing student engagement.
I’m working with the Cyber Security Student Society to organize some activities that are not targeted only to Computing students but will spread wider awareness about cybersecurity.
What would you like to see in prospective students’ applications to study Digital Design?
Curiosity. Ideally, some sort of curiosity that goes beyond the discipline of Digital Design. It’s only by learning from other disciplines that you can come up with something more unique. Showing how you think and how that changes through your process and telling the story of that process, the challenges you encountered for example, is very important and more important than the end result of a project.
What careers can you go into with a degree in Digital Design?
A lot of our alumni have gone into user experience design. Some of them go on to do a Master’s. Another popular career for our alumni is becoming game or virtual reality developers. Also VFX, 3D modelling and animation specialists. Some of them are also researchers.
What are your favorite parts of Canterbury or the surrounding area?
Westgate Gardens is nice to go walking, you can walk to Chartham. For coffee: Fringe and Ginge. The Goods Shed is great too, and right by the station!